If you live in the eastern half of the United States, it’s possible that you, like me, are too sick to think about sex. Perhaps you clicked this bookmark out of sheer habit, from the deep recesses of a germy sickbed, and didn’t really want to be titillated. For you, I’ll begin with a couple of generalized bitches (“observations”) about life.

(1) Legislators all over America are mulling plans to regulate and tax marijuana. Just great. They finally get around to legalizing recreational drugs, and they start with the one that makes me all paranoid and antisocial. Why can’t the government ever regulate and tax a drug that I like? They could do mushrooms/peyote, which are just as healthy but give you fun hallucinations, or opium, which has that cool smell. The last time I got high on marijuana, all that happened was I became so fascinated by the movie Scrooged!, I barely noticed when all my friends went home to bed. I’m going to start a new political organization, called The Legalize Cocaine, Ecstasy and Adderall Abuse Party.

(2) Seriously, what is the effin’ deal with this illness? For those who have not experienced it up close, it’s a cold/flu with a dramatic cough. If you can imagine the domestic chaos that would ensue if the head of a family of ducks came home to find his wife making love with another duck, the resulting hellish cacophony is what it sounds like when I have to cough, every 12 seconds. It’s March! I was supposed to be rolling around nude in a verdant field! This was not the plan at all!

But enough of that; our story takes place way, way, way back, near the middle of our Winter of Discontent, on New Year’s Eve. “Chloe,” a recent college graduate, was going out to a big party with “Brad”; they’re friends, and she had agreed to act as a his wingwoman. Brad had been casually dating a young lady, and hoped this would be the night to seduce her. She would be attending the same party, and the idea was that “when she showed up, he was going to gracefully ditch me.”

Chloe was wearing a Betsey Johson dress, empire waisted, with turquoise stripes, black stockings with seams up the back (for “old-fashioned whorishness”), and black stilettos by Mossimo for Target.

(Picture of the dress coming soon!)

Back-seam stockings

Mossimo pumps

Brad came over before the party, and “we get kinda coked up.” They had bought some coke a couple of weeks before, in anticipation. They went the party, where everything went as expected. Brad’s lady friend showed up, and “they were pairing up as the night went on.”

A little while before midnight, he was like “Can I leave with her?” and Chloe was like “Dude, that was the plan.” He was wearing cowboy boots, jeans and a sable corduroy jacket. Chloe says he has “rugged good looks,” and would have gotten laid anyway.

Corduroy jacket

Cowboy boots

She decided it was time to leave the party and head to a certain bar (“The Liquor Box”) where some of her friends were. She hurried over there, arrived “literally three minutes” before the countdown to midnight, and proceeded to get “shitty drunk on free champagne.”

She was with her friends, feeling comfortable and happy. But “there’s this guy.” He was across the bar from her. “I’m making eyes at him, he’s making eyes at me.” A pale blondie, she loves “swarthy men,” and he was tall, dark and handsome (it turned out that he’s Iranian). She said to herself, “I want that dude.” Knowing what to say was not a problem because, according to her, “I’m not shy.” She introduced herself, and had a conversation in which she asked the following four questions:

— What’s your name? (“Alan”)
— What do you do? (He’s a business school student)
— Where do you live? (In town, near her)
— Do you want to go home with me? (Yes)

All the stars were aligned: “I wanted to have sex, he was there, he was hot.” Alan drove her to her house, unnerving her in the process by having the “cleanest car ever.” In the living room, they “pretended to have a conversation,” in interest of feigning decorum. But it didn’t last too long. After that, there was “lots of fuckin’,” with her on top because she “wanted to look at his perfect caramel skin.” She adds that “the sex was good, nothin’ to call your mama about.” Those were here exact words, but I think your mama does not want to hear about how you were ravished by a huge Arab, even (especially?) if it was mind-blowing. They fell into a deep sleep.

In the morning, she and Alan woke up around 10 and he drove her back to her car. She was “hung over as balls,” with a mouth tasting of “ashtray and cock,” and went back to bed immediately. When she woke up again around 5, she discovered he had left a Burberry Scarf and Kenneth Cole watch behind in his “mad dash to get out of my vagina.”

The tan one is ugly.

She considered selling these items on Craigslist, but her conscience got the better of her, and she managed to track him down on Facebook (they hadn’t traded contact information, or even last names). He came and got his accessories a few days later. Since then, they’ve seen each other out multiple times; each time, they have exchanged looks across the bar, as if to say “we shared a moment of deep personal intimacy, and now I want nothing to do with you.”

It’s also worth nothing that until shortly before this story begins, Chloe was in a relationship with a “fat science fiction fan,” and she says ever since then, the guys she’s slept with are getting hotter and hotter. She attributes this to a combination of confidence, alcohol, and the fact that “I am always willing.”

Welcome to the first “Goth Edition” of CTGML! Loyal reader “Lydia” wondered whether I was interested in her goth stories, and my answer was: of course! In fact, I think it would be fun to do a series of these, focusing on different musical subgenres and the styles that are associated with them: prog, krautrock, Americana, freak-folk, yacht rock, and so on. We could learn about different cultures together. You know what genre I bet has the worst clothes? Hick-hop, that’s what.

Lydia is in her late 30’s and lives in a part of New York that’s not NYC. Two months before this story starts, she had been dumped by her boyfriend of six months. She explains that “he was the first boyfriend subsequent to my divorce, and the dumping was an unpleasant surprise. I hadn’t had any action since then; I wasn’t totally ready to jump into a new relationship, but I was open to possibilities.”

Such was her from of mind when she went out one night to dance with friends at “Release the Bats” (“local, tiny and pathetic, now defunct Goth night”; not its actual name). She was wearing a black leather biker jacket with one-inch band buttons pinned to it, “20-eye Docs and fishnets and the little Tripp skirt with purple plaid trim and a black cami,” and was “eyelinered all to hell and gone.”

Black silk camisole

Black and purple miniskirt

Tall Doc Martins

Why can’t I find a biker jacket online that looks as good as the one Kate Moss is wearing in this photo? All the designer-y ones are too weird and don’t resemble the classic style enough. Anyhow, here is an affordable option.

Black leather motorcycle jacket

Lydia got to the club shortly after doors opened, talked to a few friends, had a couple of drinks, and danced with her friend “Lenora” to songs like “Bizarre Love Triangle.” There were a couple of cute guys there, one of whom caught her eye because he looked at first glance like her friend “DJ Knobgoblin” (not his actual DJ pseudonym). On closer inspection, he turned out to be a guy she’d never met.

She ended up talking to him later, though: Tthe song “Barracuda” came on and Lydia commented “that that was KARAOKE, not dance music. Because it’s such an old song, I guess that was what started the ‘no, how old are you?’ conversation this time.” The DJ Knobgoblin lookalike was hanging around near her and Lenora, and somehow ended up joining in this discussion. As she describes him, he had hair in “the classic Robert Smith mode. Eyeliner. Long black coat with a laced back. Black t-shirt. Vinyl Tripp pants that laced up the sides, rawr. And New Rocks.”

Vinyl pants, not the same ones though

Lancôme eyeliner

His name was “Edgar.” She was 36 at the time, but “he guessed me at 22, not my vanity prompting, but more grown out of the music discussion… of course he turned the question around on me, and, honestly, with all the eyeliner, he could have been any age, so I said ’27’ which is usually safe.” He was 35, and “said he was flattered.”

As you might expect, “we started chatting. He offered to buy me a drink, and I accepted, although perhaps I shouldn’t have, as that made it my third, and I’m a lightweight.” Aww. “But we were having a good conversation, and I was having a great time. He admitted, as if it were slightly embarrassing, that he was one of those goths with a real job — a vet. Ooh, gainfully employed! When I admitted to a real job, too, he asked what I did, and when he heard baker, he said ‘Marry me!'” She adds that “my job gets that response a LOT.”

Flirting between these two was getting more intense as they found out how much they had in common. They talked about geeky, Star Wars-y stuff, and he revealed that he was divorced, too. “Neither of us does drugs any more” — or so he claimed! — “although the drugs he doesn’t do any more are not the same ones that I don’t do any more.”

She also noted that “he dances WELL. Not just the punch-the-hobbit-dropkick-the-hobbit industrial-boy style, either. Old school gothiness. But understands how to shift from the usual goth ‘no I am not looking at anyone else dance just see me not look *peek*’ to dancing WITH someone.” I feel like I’m in a new world, of aesthetic standards that I didn’t even know existed. This multiculturalism thing is working!

“I forget what we were talking about when he asked if he could kiss me. I do remember thinking ‘you actually need to ask?’ but I said yes, and, mmm. So nice to get the attention. The universe listened and sent me the boy in eyeliner I wanted!”

When it was time go, Lydia wasn’t sober enough to drive yet. They decided they could go for coffee in his car, and he could drive her back to hers later, so they went to a local diner. “I had hot chocolate with whipped cream, because I was pretty sure coffee would make me jittery, and he had cheese fries (although I tried to warn him it’d be nacho goo on them) and a Coke.” A baker and a veterinarian, having cheese fries and cocoa at a diner? I didn’t know that was part of the Goth lifestyle, because they never write songs about that. Nobody writes songs that adorable. Even goddamn Beat Happening would have been like “we can’t do this song, it isn’t edgy enough.”

“I said ‘let me see if I can do this without getting whipped cream on my nose,’ which meant treating it kind of like an ice cream cone, to which he said ‘now you’re just teasing me.’ My response was ‘and it’s not even a cherry stem!’ He admitted to cheating, in earlier times, by hiding a pre-tied cherry stem in his mouth.”” I guess this part’s kind of edgy. “As we were driving back to the club to get my car, I asked if he was driving back home then, or following me, or what? He said ‘are you inviting me?’ I said, ‘I’m inviting you.’ He was pleased.”

“There are few things more fraught with silly than two laced-up goths getting undressed for bed, let me tell you.” After dealing with her boots, she took off her last few things in the bathroom, grabbed a condom, and emerged wearing a paisley satin robe. He was still wearing his vinyl pants and socks. “I cuddled up next to him, and the smooches began in earnest. He had his hand tangled into my hair, pretty strongly. Melt!”

“Wasn’t long before he discovered the nekkid under the bathrobe, and commented on it. My response was ‘and you’re overdressed.'” The rest of the clothes came off. Lydia says that Edgar “had skills” and that his tongue piercing “rocked [her] world.” “When I went for the condom, though, he said no”; He gave her some whole explanation about how he really liked her, and would want to take her on a date before having sex. “More cuddling and kissing, and eventually sleep.”

He left in the morning with a terrible hangover, and promised to call if he wasn’t dead. “I played happy music while I was at work — for my values of happy: the Cure’s “Head on the Door,” Elvis Costello’s “My Aim is True,” the Horrorpops, the Raveonettes.” Hmmm, I suppose that’s pretty happy. Like, if you ranked all the music in the world according to how cheerful it was, and you gave a ten to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” by The Ohio Express, and a zero to “Raping a Slave” by Swans, then Elvis Costello or the Raveonettes would probably get about a six. (One of today’s elecronic DJ “mashup” artists should consider doing a mashup of “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” and “Raping a Slave”; it would probably get a lot of attention.)

In the next couple of days, she exchanged a few texts with him, and ended up hanging out at his place soon after. “We didn’t exactly DATE, although we hung out and fooled around a couple more times in the next month. ” It all came to and end when he stood her up for a party she’d asked him to, and gave a suspicious-sounding excuse. She started asking around about him, “at which point I had the glorious experience of four people telling me separately, ‘Oh, HIM? He’s an asshole,’ and going into detail about the coke habit and some of his past exploits.” He wasn’t even a vet, just a vet tech!

If you’re a less copious drinker than most of my readers, you might find this helpful: “For a while, I had a really good line for declining a third drink. Oh, no, two’s my limit. Know what I did the last time I had three drinks?’ (pause) ‘Edgar.'”

**** Thanks to Emel for coming up with the name “DJ Knobgoblin.” If any real DJs out there want to use this, it’s all yours.

A few months ago, I got interviewed by a journalist for the local paper about this website, and she asked me WTF I was talking about when I said it’s a third-wave feminist blog. I answered her question as best I could at the time, but today I was reminded of why I felt so strongly about it in the first place. I happened to read this article on Salon.com, and it’s totally an example what today’s sex-positive fashion blogger is up against.

It’s called “Your ‘Orgasm Face’?: Cosmo and the Pornification of Women.” Basically, a certain “Amy Tuteur” rails against today’s modern culture of “increasing sexual openness,” on the grounds that it is a “bonanza for men” but not any fun for women. I have not had a chance to look at the Cosmopolitan article to which this piece refers; my extensive schedule of reading, writing letters, hunting for old curios, and vigorous Socratic debate sometimes precludes my reading influential Cosmo pieces in as timely a fashion as I would like. Nevertheless, I take strong exception to this argument (Tuteur’s, not the orgasm-face one), and would like to register my disagreement in as firm an manner as possible. For example, there’s this:

Men get all the benefits; women carry all the risks. Men get laid, get action, get lucky and women get pregnant, get sexually transmitted diseases, get infertile, get cervical cancer.

Where to begin, in this farrago of unwarranted assumptions and logical fallacies? Setting aside the question of what sort of freaky sex act makes you pregnant and infertile, at the same time, — the whole premise of today’s dissolute culture is that women, not just men, enjoy having sex. When a dude and a woman have sex, both of them are getting laid, not just one. Both of them could write in to my website and tell me about it, especially if they were wearing cute outfits. Does this “Amy Tuteur” believe that women have been pretending this entire time (since the 60s and 70s — even earlier in the case of your mom {because she’s old, and a slut}) that they like getting fucked; whereas really, it is a ruse to appease the patriarchy? Alternately, perhaps they think they like fucking, but really don’t. Well, that’s kind of condescending, Amy Tuteur. (This woman, incidentally, is a gynecologist. I would hate to have a gynecologist that judgmental; my gyno is a fun lady, who once told me about how she treated her undereye bags using prescription hemorrhoid cream.)

The most puzzling bit is the following:

{Pornography is bad, etc. etc.}, and all in exchange for what? Young men are almost always sexually satisfied by their relationships. Young women? Not so much … because young men are often inexperienced lovers more concerned about their own enjoyment than anything else.”

Well jeez, how are they ever going to get any better? The whole point of young dudes is that they fuck a lot of women, and eventually they get good at it. That is what they are here for. If everybody refused to fuck them (for fear of being “pornified”), they would never learn how to please a woman. (Sorry to be so heteronormative, but Tuteur doesn’t have anything to say about queer people and their problems.) In the aggregate, if lots of people go out and have casual sex, progress is made. That’s why if you fuck a young guy — even if it ends up not being that great — you are making a contribution.

Look, America. If we want to solve the terrible problem of inexperienced, inept young men, we’ve all got to work together. Teaching young people the skills and techniques they need to succeed in the twenty-first century is a goal that involves all of us — that needs the contributions of people like you, but is also so much bigger than any one individual. But it won’t always be easy. (Unlike your mom.) Sometimes the task will be intensely humiliating, painful, or even bloody. There will be times when you are too numbed up on coke to feel anything, or too drunk to remember your partner’s name. You must persevere, Americans. In the end, you will be proud of yourself, because you were on the right side of history. A story I heard recently proves this to be true.

This takes place about two years ago, when “Naomi” was a model living in New York. One night she was drunk at a rooftop party on the Lower East Side; apparently the building had a great view, because my notes say “downtown, lights, awesome.” She was wearing black cutoff shorts, made from a pair of old jeans that had shrunk in the wash, and a pair of flat leather boots that used to belong to an old roommate. She had stolen dozens of this woman’s items over time, by borrowing them and not returning them, which was fair because all of them “looked better” on her.

Black denim cutoff shorts

Loeffler Randall boot

The boots that follow are only tangentially relevant, but it’s boot season! Everyone wants suggestions on hot new boots! Also, I spent a lot of time researching flat leather boots.

Coclico boots

Frye riding boot

Hayden-Harnett just sent me an e-mail about these boots, with the ridiculous subject line “Hayden-Harnett’s Leather Booty Call of Love.”

Hayden Harnett riding boot

Somehow, Naomi ended up talking to “Tyler.” What did they talk about? “I don’t remember.” Whatever it was, it must have held her interest, because they decided to go back to his place. He was house-sitting for a friend who also lived on the lower East Side, so that’s where they went.

Was Tyler hot? She was “so wasted, it wasn’t gonna matter.” Also, “coke was probably involved.” Thus, the tragic irony of hedonism: If you are too avid in your pursuit of pleasure, you end up unable to enjoy anything. Always use cocaine responsibly. At his house, “we totally had sex,” but “I remember nothing.” Presumably they went to sleep. “When I woke up,” continues Naomi, “there was blood all over the sheets.”

She was furious when she discovered this: “Did I just get my fuckin’ friend?” We all know that the monthly cycle is a miracle of nature, and puts a womyn’s body in tune with the phases of the moon, but Naomi didn’t care about any of that. She wanted no part of nature and its cycles; she was embarrassed, and worried that “he thinks I’m crazy” for bleeding all over his friend’s bed. They had the following conversation:

“Did you get your period?”

“Oh, fuck it.”

She investigated the matter, but found nothing. (Fun fact for men: The way you check whether you’re having your period is, you stick a finger up your vagina. You can’t learn that from fuckin’ Salon.com, can you??) Naomi went to the bathroom and discovered the source of the blood. When she was up on the roof, she must fallen and skinned her knees without noticing it. When they got in that night, “my knees were gushing blood.” They were fucking doggy-style, and that’s how it got all over the sheets. “I didn’t realize it because I was fucking wasted.”

Obviously, Naomi has forgotten almost everything about this incident, but it ended up being memorable in one way: “I still have the scars.”

How come all my e-mail submissions come from young college women living in major American cities? I am overjoyed to know that this demographic appreciates my aesthetic vision, and I’m also glad that college gals are ignoring the haters and exploring their sexuality. I just want to represent a broader range of human experience. As examples, the following are some possible types of people I would like to hear from:

— A 45-year-old single dad living in a hardscrabble Nevada mining town

— An Amish teen going through rumspringa

— Tenured academics who hold wife-swapping parties with cocaine and Château Margaux (do people do this anymore since the 70’s?)

— A gay naval officer on board a submarine (please send me these even if you don’t remember what you were wearing)

“Ariana” is a student at a college located in a well-known northeastern metropolis. Her story is exceptional in its way, though: She wrote in to tell me that “last night, I found myself in a threesome.” To understand how it happened, we have to go back to the beginning of the evening. She went to visit friends in their dorm wearing a dark blue tank top from Forever 21 and a denim miniskirt; according to her, this cute outfit was rendered “sort of fugly” by weird tights, about which more later.

She and her friends “played Apples to Apples and ate cookies and somewhere in all of this I ended up extremely drunk.” Apples to Apples is fucking awesome, by the way, especially for drunk people who can’t deal with some complicated bullshit like chess. Eventually “it was time to stumble back to my dorm. My friends wanted me to stay or allow someone to walk me home, but I like waking up with my own toothbrush and I hate inconveniencing people, so I walked back alone. I stopped and bought some coffee to sober myself up with, and I got back just fine.”

Ariana was freshly caffeinated and ready for the second stage of her evening. Often the best adventures happen in this type of after-party scenario, when you thought you were about to go to bed. In this case, “I stepped off the elevator on my floor and got pulled into the dorm across from the elevator, where the girls who lived there were being visited by three guys. I’ve seen these boys around a lot — they’re always in that particular room, and they never close the door — but I’d never been introduced. I met them, and they seemed cool.” Were they hot? Let’s assume so. “I had two cans of Coors Light or something equally nasty.” Another key to successful partying is to keep drinking after you think you’ve hit a wall and need to stop. Most of the time this is absolutely disastrous, but when it works, it can allow you to “break on through to the other side” into a new world of drunkenness.

Ariana and two of the dudes decided they wanted to go smoke, so they rode the elevator downstairs. At this point Ariana’s e-mail veered off into rationalizations about how she doesn’t actually smoke, but does sometimes on weekends. She refers to the dudes as N. and O., so I’ll call them Orange Julius and Negroni, after the drinks. “In the elevator we met J. {“Juniper”}, a girl who recognized me because we lived in the same dorm last year. We all sat around and smoked.”

But why smoke cigarettes when you could be smoking weed? They all wanted some, and Juniper had a connection, “so she made the call. We all started walking to the dorm where her friend lived.” At some point during the walk, Ariana and Juniper started making out. Naturally this made the boys very happy. “Me and Juniper told them that we’d have sex with them if they’d make out with each other. I’d met this girl half an hour before, but we made an amazing team.” When I was in college my friends and I were always trying to get guys to make out.

After a brief detour to get high with the drug dealer, they took a taxi back to the guys’ place. “Me and Juniper made out for the entire trip. Back in Negroni and Orange Julius’s room, we continued to make out but told them nothing more would happen until they kissed. They begged us to be kind. We refused. Finally, they did kiss. Orange Julius left, and we got it on with Negroni and each other. Mostly each other, because Negroni was very drunk and was having trouble keeping it up.”

Strangely enough, Ariana doesn’t seem too upset about the lack of male participation. This could be the beginning of a new way of life for her. From the guy’s perspective, though, it’s a poignant catch-22. If you drink too much you might have to sit out the first or only ménage-a-trois of your life, but without heavy drinking, you are unlikely to get into one at all. Finally, the young man fell asleep and the ladies returned to their rooms.

Just as I requested, Ariana surveyed the disheveled clothes on her floor this morning and decided to e-mail me. “That was the first time I wore those divinely unflattering tights, and it probably be the last because I tore them really badly while putting them back on.” The tights were bad because, while they appeared opaque in the package, when worn they revealed horizontal stripes of a more transparent black. Who wants that? I hate how it’s almost damn impossible to find decent black tights. They’re always trying to trick you into buying ones that look black but are actually dark brown, or navy, or have some retarded pattern or something, and then if they are black, they’re never opaque enough. Last winter I found some amazing ones, so I’m going to link to them here.